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Book Review: The Sacrifice by Joyce Carol Oates

8/27/2015

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This is only the second of Oates’s books that I’ve read (The Accursed was the first), but I plan to delve more deeply into her work.  Fortunately, she’s been prolific, so I have a lot to look forward to.  The Sacrifice is a fictionalized version of the 1987 Tawana Brawley incident, wherein a fourteen year-old black girl in a New Jersey town was found beaten, hog-tied and befouled with excrement and scrawled racial slurs, claiming she was kidnapped and raped by a group of white men, including at least one cop. I remember the episode and the media feeding frenzy it ignited, especially when the Rev. Al Sharpton adopted Brawley’s cause as his personal crusade for racial justice (among other things).

I don’t know what prompted Oates to turn this gruesome story into a novel, but I’m glad she did. It’s a wrenching page-turner that pulled me in and wouldn’t let me go until I finished.  Oates is a masterful writer whose characters are fully drawn.  Her dialogue is more than deft. There’s almost nobody to like in this story and yet it’s a compulsive read.  That’s a tough feat for a writer to pull off.

The interesting take-away question for me is, who is the sacrifice alluded to in the title?  My vote is that it is the protagonist, Sybilla.  But you’ll have to read the book and decide for yourself.

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Deep Into Rewrites

8/20/2015

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I’m working on the third draft of my thriller, Tell On You.  A couple of my reviewers have weighed in with their feedback and suggestions (the rest of you, and you know who you are, please hop to it!).  Mostly, I find revising easier than writing the first draft.  At least I have something there to work with and it’s gratifying to know I’m improving the novel as I chug along.

But still, receiving constructive feedback makes me feel like a bottle of salad dressing being shaken.  I know it will come out better that way, but it’s unsettling. I’ve had practice taking feedback, thanks to five years in a great critique group.  Yet much as I hate to admit it, my initial gut reaction to criticism and suggestions is usually a bit of resistance.  Sometimes more than a bit.  I have thoughts like:

 It’ll ruin my story/protagonist/summer, etc. if I do that.

 That’s going to be way too much work.

 What does that reviewer know, anyway?

Maybe most, or all, writers tend to react that way.  We’re enamored of what we’ve written.  We don’t want to kill our darlings.

But, after the initial NOOO!! I let the critique and suggestions marinate in my head for a while.  (You can use salad dressing as a marinade, right?  So I’m not really mixing metaphors here.)  At this stage, I’m pondering, trying on the ideas, considering where they might take me.  I’ve often found that the suggestions I resist the most at first prove the most fruitful when I finally take them to heart.  And usually the surgery required to integrate them into my manuscript isn’t as invasive and painful as I’d feared.

So I’m halfway through my third draft now, giving my protagonist some touch-ups so readers won’t dislike him too much.  And I like where this rewrite is going!  Last week, my guest blogger Scott Bell shared some excellent lessons he’d learned about rewriting.  I’d love to hear from fellow writers about your own struggles and triumphs as you revise.

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Guest Post: My Path, or How I Stepped in Every Cow Patty in the Trail

8/13/2015

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How many times have you thought, Man, that’s easy.  Hold my beer while I try this…? 

I remember thinking, at 16-years old, “I can rebuild that carburetor.  How hard can it be?”  Or there was the time I said to my wife, “We don’t need to spend money on a driving school; we can teach the kids to drive ourselves.”  And I’ll always remember, “Remodel the kitchen?  Sure!  No problem!” 

Skinned knuckles, hurt feelings, and a lot of cursing later, I always discovered my optimism was sadly misplaced. 

But somehow, when it came to writing, the same bit of nonsense dribbled through my mind, “I can write a novel.  How hard can it be?”

Flashback to 2010 

A fresh Word document is open.  The little blinky cursor line (I call it a curse line today) is mocking me.  I want to write a story.  A novel.  With characters and whatnot.  Words.  Sentences.  Explosions, sex, violence.  

Okay.  Go ahead.  Start.

“Chapter One” I type.  Good.  What next?  I indent the words.  Then I center them.  Then I change it to read “Chapter 1.”  I hit enter, enter.  Tab.  

Ready for the first paragraph.

So I think, “What do I want my story to be about?” 

Without going into a painful recounting of that whole mess, let’s jump forward a little to the point where the first draft is complete, which is when I learn how truly bad it sucked.  I was fortunate enough to fall into a critique community chock full of people who ripped my writing to 

It was at this point, I learned “The Rules.”

The Rules

Thou shalt not commit adverbary.  It was revealed unto me that adverbs are tools of the devil and their usage would condemn me to everlasting hell.  Based on that advice, I dutifully (see what I did there?) purged my work of anything ending in LY.  Period.  If it modified a verb, 

Thou shalt not write in passive voice.  The rule itself, I later learned, is bogus.  Passive voice doesn’t mean what they think it means.  What they mean to say is: Don’t use weak verbs to convey meaning.  Was is the biggest offender, and too much wassing is a mortal sin.  So I went forth and rid my manuscript of all the “was” verbs I could, rewriting entire paragraphs in order to 

Thou shalt not tell, thou shalt show.  This one was trickier.  Instead of saying: Johnny felt sick to his stomach, one should say something like: Queasiness made Johnny dizzy.  I was supposed to show the action/result rather than tell the reader what happened.  Sometimes a simple show can result in a two-dozen word rewrite.  But them’s the rules, chump. 

Thou shalt not infodump backstory.  In my first weak attempts at novel writing, I created all these cool characters and I wanted to share them with everyone.  So I told readers all about the character’s history, starting from when dey wuz babies and carrying on trew dey adultness.  That earned me the scarlet letter of N for novice, newbie, nincompoop.

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Writing With Rules…and Without

So after learning these rules (and many more, like:  Don’t eat peanut butter and type at the same time.) I rewrote my story.  

And it still sucked.

Now we must fast forward another few months, during which I had a number of epiphanies.  Call them codicils to The Rules.

One, it’s about the character, stupid.  People read stories for the characters.  Period.  They like your character, and care what happens to him or her, they’ll turn to page two.

Two, it’s about the plot, dimwit.  People continue to read stories for the plot.  Are the things happening to the character interesting, unique, challenging, and/or thought-provoking?  If it is, the reader keeps turning the pages until the end.

Three, it’s about the journey, moron.  People will enjoy what they read, and tell their friends to read it, if the journey was fulfilling in some way.  They followed the character through the plot and had a good time doing it. The journey made them happy, sad, angry, or whatever.  They learned something, or laughed out loud, or got a thrill from blowing up the container ship full of pirates.

The Cow Patties

So these days, what I try to do is avoid the cow patties in the trail.  Trust me, if you’ve ever walked barefoot in the country, you know the feeling of fresh cow dung squeezing between your toes.  Pretty much what it feels like to me when I realize I’ve over-adverbed a scene.  Or used too many wasses.  Or told instead of shown. These are the mechanics of writing and it’s good to know what they look like.

But…

All of The Rules have their place, but strict adherence will not help your writing, IF you fail to create an interest cast of characters and send them on a satisfying journey.

I know when I do that, I win.

Author Bio

Scott Bell has over 25 years of experience protecting the assets of retail companies.  He holds a degree in Criminal Justice from North Texas State University. 

With the kids grown and time on his hands, Scott turned back to his first love—writing. His short stories have been published inThe Western Online, Cast of Wonders, and in the anthology, Desolation. 

When he’s not writing, Scott is on the eternal quest to answer the question:  What would John Wayne do?

Author’s Blog - http://snapshooter4hire.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ScottBellAuthor

Yeager's Law is available on Amazon!

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Book Review: The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

8/6/2015

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Here’s another classic I’ve finally gotten around to reading.  The first German book to top the New York Times bestseller list, The Reader is both disturbing and inspiring.  The protagonist, Michael, (the titular reader) is seduced as a teen by Hanna, a woman over twice his age, who awakens him sexually and spoils him for anyone else.  She disappears only to resurface as a defendant in a Nazi war crimes trial he is observing as a law student.  He struggles with his feelings about who she is, what she may or may not have done and his own possible moral obligation to reveal a truth about her that he alone seems to know.

I greatly enjoyed this small gem of a book.  It abounds in paradox.  The story is simple, yet laden with complexities.  Michael is of the generation whose parents were adults in the Third Reich, bequeathing his cohort a horrifying burden of shame and outrage.  Add to that the confusion of a precocious sexual relationship and we have a narrator whose innocence has truly been stolen.  Both Hanna and Michael wage lonely struggles to make right out of terrible wrongs.  It is left to the reader (apt, that) to determine how well they succeed.  This is a haunting story.

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    Author

    Freda Hansburg is a psychologist and co-author of two 
    self-help books, PeopleSmart - which h​as sold more than 75,000 copies and has been translated into ten languages - and 
    Working PeopleSmart, 
    as well as numerous professional publications.  Her first novel Shrink Rapt, 
    is a psychological thriller with a dash of romance. She lives in the South Carolina Low Country.

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